


Blood is Thicker than Water

by FromAnonymousToZ



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Companionship, Gen, Graphic depictions of Vicera, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, I'm not kidding., Murder, Non-Linear Narrative, Unorthodox Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-19
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:40:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29557158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FromAnonymousToZ/pseuds/FromAnonymousToZ
Summary: The Beast and Lorna see eye to eye in a way only monsters can.
Relationships: The Beast & Lorna (Over the Garden Wall)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 12





	Blood is Thicker than Water

She cannot bring herself to face him when she hears his footsteps. Her eyes are fixed instead upon the mark of her shame, covering her hands with red. Tears burn in the corners of her eyes and blur her vision until all she sees is sickening red. 

Red covering her hands.

Red staining the snow.

Red smeared across her face. 

It’s still warm on her lips, and it covers her tongue in copper, and she feels her stomach lurch sickeningly, churning. 

She knows if she lifts her gaze even a bit, she’ll see it. The child, stomach ripped open, organs ripped to and fro in her mania, flesh torn asunder from bone as she picked him clean. Viscera clings to her teeth, and her dress is ruined. She can feel the hollowed eye sockets upon her and clutches at her arms. 

Her hunger has abated, for now, reduced to only a distant memory in the corner of her mind. Vague mortification claws at her throat as bile and blood mix on her tongue. 

She cannot even bring herself to feel sorry for the child because secretly, she’s grateful. She was delighted when the child did not heed her warning, and even now, she cannot bring herself to mourn. She’s not upset she killed him, not truly, because as her fingers dug into the soft flesh of his stomach, she had been exhilarated, laughing, eyes blazing and wild as magic burned through her.

But the fact she had needed to…

Her hand claps over her mouth as her stomach churns, smearing blood across her face. 

He stands passive, at her side, regarding her. 

If it had been her Auntie, she would have hidden her face, pleading forgiveness, consumed by shame. But she cannot bring herself to it. 

His eyes hold no judgment. They never do. 

“Oh, Turtle,” She whimpers, and copper spills over her lips. “How do you do it?” 

His furs are gently draped over her shoulders, and she tugs them close instinctively. They smell like oil and frost. 

When she was young, small, and sickly, she would hunt squirrels. 

She delighted in feeling them squirm in her hands, the crunch as their bones gave way beneath her fingers, the throbbing pulse of their blood when her teeth were buried in fur. 

It had distressed Auntie, and looking back now, Lorna could understand why, but at the time, she did not understand why her prey was always taken away and why she was punished each time. She can still remember the sting of tears and humiliation when Auntie made her sweep the floors because she had found Lorna pulling apart a raccoon in the backyard. 

The first time she killed another human, she was only eight, and it was a little boy who lived in the nearby town. 

She killed him with a rock, clutching it in her hands bashing him over the head over and over again until his skull splintered, and his face was nothing but a red pulp smeared across her hands. In a frenzy, she had descended upon him. Her fingernails were blunt and did not part his skin, but her teeth consumed as she stripped flesh from bone. 

His flesh had been like ambrosia to her tongue, his blood nectar, invigorating her and giving her strength. She could not stop herself as she gorged herself upon his flesh, all the while thinking of how pretty his bones would be.

Auntie had found her, smeared in gristle and clutching his bones tight to her chest, and had wept, pulling her away from the corpse, dragging her from the town. 

She remembers being asked why she would do such a thing. 

She was hungry.

They did not like that answer. 

And then her Auntie had done something foolish, something her Auntie regretted to this day. 

“If I had not gone to him, perhaps he never would have noticed you, my dear.” She would say as she sent Lorna to go and sort the bones. 

Lorna does not think so. 

Because if Auntie had not brought her to meet him, she would have found him herself. 

She can remember that night with startling clarity. 

The blood on her clothes was not yet dry as Auntie bundled her up and brought her deep into the woods. 

It was a dark night, but a clear one, where the stars twinkled above their heads like knowing eyes, but the moon was nowhere to be found. The twisted trees loomed over them, warping and bending as they reached to cradle the sky in gnarled fingers. 

“Beast!” Auntie had cried out into the night. “I have come to ask your council!” 

For a long moment, nothing had happened, the wind whispered gently through the trees ushering with it the rasp of dead leaves as Lorna had huddled closer to her Auntie, fear like poison creeping through her veins. 

“How very strange.” The voice that drifts through the night is low and deep, like that of a man. It is melodical, like someone reciting a nursery rhyme. “It has been a long time since you graced me with your presence, Whispers.” 

And then he had moved, peeling away from the woods, and Lorna’s lips fell open with a gasp. She had not noticed him before. He was a creature of shadow, tall and slender, taller than even Auntie, with two branches protruding from his head.

But his eyes were the most mesmerizing feature of them all.

They were white, like moons inlaid in the face of shadow, but when she gasps, they turn towards her, ringing with peculiar colors. 

They were so pretty, so dangerous, that she had been torn between stepping forward to get a better look at him and shrinking back against Auntie’s skirts. 

“And who might this be?” He had crooned, leaning down. He was still taller than her, but she could see his pretty eyes as the rings in them spun and bled into each other, slowly melting back into white. 

“Her name is of no concern to you, Beast.” Her Auntie had said, and Lorna had never heard her sound more clipped. “She is cursed. A hunger that she cannot control has taken root within her.”

“And you’d like my help.” He says, and it is not a question. It is a statement. 

Auntie does not reply. 

Slowly, his head tilted, eyes fixed upon hers, and she could not tear her eyes away from him. 

He had offered his hand towards her, spindly claws splayed out in an invitation. 

“Perhaps you and I should speak alone, Pup,” His voice is gentle, like a parent coaxing a frightened child. 

She glances up at her Auntie’s face, pulled into a frown, brows furrowed, but Auntie does not stop her as she reaches towards him, bridging the gap between them. 

His hand felt like touching the bark of an old tree. For a moment, she stared at her hand in his, it seemed so small and frail compared to him, paleness framed by shadow, and then she looked up into his eyes. They blazed with light, hypnotic and comforting, and then, they were no longer in the forest. Lorna didn’t know where they were, but it was a place of pure shadow, yawning up swallowing them whole. 

It should be scary, it should be terrifying, but instead, in some strange way, it is comforting, like a blanket pulled up around her shoulders. 

She can no longer see him in the shadow. Only his eyes remain. 

Her hand tightens upon his, and claws wrap comfortingly around her tiny hand, dwarfing it. 

And then, she can feel something, something not quite in her chest, a hunger, like her own, one with sharp teeth that yawned on forever and made her seem merely peckish in comparison. She wants to pull away to hide from the hunger, but instead, it laps like a docile animal at her, hungry but restrained. 

And for a moment, she feels understood, and she begins to feel tears welling up in her eyes as relief that she is not alone crests over her. 

His hunger is ravenous. It leans and warps outwards in every direction and burns in his eyes. 

She stares, transfixed.

“My name is Lorna,” She whispers into the hunger, and the hunger swallows her name and smiles. 

“Hello, Little Lorna,” It coos sweetly. “I am the Beast.” 

And then she’s back in the forest, at Auntie’s side, and the hunger wrapped around her is fading, seeping back into the shadowy figure now straightening to address her Auntie. 

“She is hungry, but she is not the one at fault for what she consumes. There is another being, one that shares her body, and she is a slave to it.” He says, and his voice drips with a familiarity. 

Lorna is a child, and she cannot be helped when she sniffles and tries to run towards him, to fling her arms about his legs and beg him to help her. Auntie holds her back, one hand resting on Lorna’s shoulder, anchoring her in place. 

“She will have to learn to restrain it on her own, or she will never be able to stop it when it decides to consume. She will have to control it, or it will control her.” 

“But her hunger? What are we to do about it?”

And even though he has no mouth, Lorna can sense his smile, wide and wicked. 

“There is only one thing to be done.” For a moment, all the world is still. “Feed it.” 

Auntie does not like his answer very much. 

That was, of course, before the Bell. 

Lorna is brought out of her memories by the gentle patting of a claw-tipped hand against her shoulder. 

“Not so differently from you,” He replies, voice dripping and spinning like the notes of a song petering out into the night. “But I have had many thousands more years to discipline myself.” 

She sniffles at that and offers him a weak smile. His eyes peer down luminously, as unreadable as they had been all those nights before when she had been no taller than his knee. 

Once again, he offers her his hand, and this time she takes it without hesitance. 

He helps her to her feet then stoops to gather the child's bones from the snow, leaving crimson in their wake. She watches him, pulling his furs closer about her shoulders. 

When he stands, bones gathered in his arms, they walk, side by side, back towards her Auntie’s house. 

Lorna is not the child she was. Though she is still frail and sickly, she has grown into a lovely young woman, but she still does not compare to him. She is still small at his side, and her hands are still dwarfed by his. 

Since their first meeting, Lorna had never felt alone in the woods. As if there was always someone at her back, not protecting, per se, but watching. 

When she was still very small, she used to sneak out, when the wind buffeted snow flurries past the windows and decorated the world in frost, and she would wander, sometimes driven by her hunger to hunt, and sometimes driven by something else. Loneliness perhaps. 

When the moon was high, and she had been wandering blindly for hours, a tall figure would peel itself away from the brush, previously unnoticed. 

The Beast would take her hand in his, stooping so that her arm did not have to reach up. He would lead her, past birch trees with watchful eyes and willows with mournful leaves, past frozen lakes and between twisted edelwoods, until they could see the first hints of Auntie’s home between the trees, and he would release her hand and nod her towards the house. 

Slowly, like a faun separating from its mother for the very first time, she would walk away from him tentatively, and by the time she reached the door of the cabin and glanced over her shoulder, his eyes would be gone, dissipated back into shadow. 

As Lorna got older, she snuck out less and less, though that is not to say she did not on occasion sneak away. But she found that he came to visit her more. 

He was a quiet thing, pensive by nature, at least where his songs were not concerned. 

She was lonely, tucked away from the world, in a prison that was the fault of her hunger, and he was… something else. He was not trapped, but Lorna did not think he had very many friends, nor did he particularly want many. 

She spent many an hour not doing her chores, sitting at the window, her shawl pulled around her shoulders as she shared tea with him.

He never seemed to drink, instead holding the cup as if it were warming his claws and sniffing at it. 

He had many stories, stories from everywhere, about everything, and he spun them for her. 

As she grew older and their friendship grew, she became better acquainted with what he was, and she realized how unlike her he was. And yet, at his core, he was hungry, just like her. 

“Auntie shall be very disappointed in me.” She says, her voice stained by a weak attempt at humor, and he hums lightly. 

“You still have much time before your Aunt returns, enough to sort the bones and change your dress. If you would like, Nightingale,” He says as they approach Auntie’s house. “I could distract her further and buy you more time.” 

“Oh, that would be lovely, Turtle, but she will find my bloodied dress eventually, and she will know I tried to hide it from her, and then I shall be punished for my wickedness.”

He seems to consider that as they reach the doorstep of her Aunt’s house. 

He wouldn’t come inside, no matter how she asked or pleaded. It was a lesson she had learned long ago. When she was a witch of her own, with a home of her own, he would visit her, but he dared not intrude in Auntie Whisper’s home. 

She takes the bones from his arms gingerly. 

“Once you have changed, leave your bloodied dress upon the window sill. I shall fetch it before your Aunt returns.” She wants to protest, to tell him he needn't trouble himself, but he is already trekking back towards the woods. 

She does as he instructs, sorting the bones carefully, picking away any flesh and muscle still clinging to them, and sucking the blood still sticking to them until they shine with polished white. Changing her dress quickly and leaving the bloodied thing folded neatly upon the windowsill. 

She does not see him retrieve it, but when Auntie returns home, it is gone, and nothing is left in its place but a light dusting of snow. 

“Have you been wicked today, Lorna?” Auntie asks, looking over her carefully, and Lorna tugs at the hem of her bow, hoping that she has washed all the blood from her face. 

“Yes, Auntie,” She murmurs quickly and prays that Auntie does not smell the copper on her breath. 

Her Auntie looks over her skeptically and insists on inspecting the bones but finds nothing amiss but carefully polished ossein. 

Later that evening, when a gentle tapping upon the pane of the window awakes her, she slips out of bed. 

Her dress is carefully folded upon the sill, and she gathers it in her arms. The blood has been washed out so that no trace remains. She presses her face into it, and it smells only of oil and forest. Auntie would not be able to smell the blood upon it. 

She smiles giddily out towards the wood, even though she can detect no figure in its gaunt shadows. 

Auntie might not understand. She might make Lorna file down her teeth and use the Bell to make her polish the floors and cut the firewood and do the laundry so that she has no time to hunt in the woods.

Buts that's ok.

Because there is someone who understands.


End file.
